Posted on March 5, 2025 in Interviews
This TIE Talks features returning guest Dr. Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. Martha joins TIE Talks to discuss her new book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. With several historical nonfiction titles under her belt, Martha turned to memoir to trace her family’s history along the “jagged color line.” Using oral histories, letters, photographs, and family heirlooms, she goes beyond “official” archival documents to chronicle her family’s history of enslavement, evading anti-miscegenation laws, and leadership at the historically Black liberal arts college Bennett College. By looking at her family’s past, Martha seeks to understand her own Black identity and how her ancestors touched and crossed America’s color line. In the interview, Martha explains her decision to write a memoir, how her Black Studies academic background aided the research process, and her advice for pursuing historical family research as a Black or mixed-race scholar.
Again and again, I discovered in The Trouble of Color how we’ve been snagged along the sharp edges of the color line. My family has never fit neatly on one side or the other of the fictious but very real divide we call race. Instead, we have nursed wounds inflicted by those who have insisted that we must be Black or white, but never more. Never both. Doctors checked boxes. Census takers filled blanks. Undertakers circled choices. Record keepers, neighbors, judges, department store clerks, constables, and historians have all sized us up. Too often they got us all wrong and the scars we have borne are evidence of how dangerous encounters with the jagged color line can be.
I was raised to think that my parents, who married in defiance of anti-miscegenation laws, were firsts. They had their own troubled 1960s encounters along the color line when, for example, it came time for them to buy a home. They had, I learned, inherited that strife. Not unlike my mother, my great-great-grandmother Mary Jones began her life in North Carolina’s Piedmont as a so-called white woman. To marry her husband Elijah, a man of color, and make a family with him in the 1820s, Mary stepped over the color line and passed as a woman of color for all her adult life. In harrowing moments, she kept her family’s secret while officials asked questions that threatened to expose her marriage as invalid and make her children wards of the state. The more I learned about Mary, the more I understood how dangerous it had been to defy the uneven lines that North Carolina lawmakers tried to draw. I admired Mary’s courage and how it sustained her in the face of those who would have torn her family apart. She knew the trouble of color.
The Trouble of Color opens with me as an 18-year-old college freshman. I was surprised to be in college at all; I’d not been a good student in high school. And I was so eager to explore the world that this new start opened up for me. I didn’t think twice about becoming a Black Studies student; it was 1976 and the field was being made right there on university campuses. I also didn’t think through how other students might perceive me, that I might be regarded as an interloper. The book starts with a moment in which a classmate questioned my belonging. This was its own form of consciousness raising: Color, the color of our skin matters, and mine was, I learned, too light to some eyes.
The book begins with that classroom confrontation because it’s a moment I’ve never forgotten, even all these years later. That moment, of being publicly challenged about my identity, made an impression and not only because I was embarrassed. It went deep because I recognized, even if I didn’t yet have the words, that I had a story to tell, that I would need to tell a story about myself if I wanted to be understood and to be seen. Sometimes, what we know in our hearts—including who we are and the families we come from—isn’t apparent to others. And sometimes, we don’t yet have the words with which to fully tell that story.
The Trouble of Color ends very close to where it begins, from my perspective as a student and young adult; it is a full circle. The questions I faced in that SUNY New Paltz classroom I began to ask about my own family. I looked for answers in the life of my great-great-grandmother Nancy Bell Graves. She was born enslaved in 1808 Kentucky and her color was close to my own, but that meant something different in her time than it has in mine. By the final chapter, I am still that college student and readers meet my own father. I revisit how he and I parted ways when it came to what color meant in our lives. I was left to find answers to those questions for myself.
I began The Trouble of Color steeped in academic understandings of the Black past. As you know, I am a historian of law, politics, and culture as seen through the perspective of Black Americans. It is my job to stay current with the newest thinking on these topics and this book benefitted immeasurably from the work of other scholars who shared my interest in the history of the color line. Still, I failed each time I tried to write a conventional account of my family’s past. I knew how to recount facts and interpret them much as historians before me had done, but it was not enough. Finally, I had to set aside scholarly questions and answers and make room for how it has felt to be us. Little in my academic work had trained me for that.
At the same time, Black Studies is a broad field and fortunately my colleagues also include poets, novelists, and writers of memoir. Approaching The Trouble of Color, I was drawn to their work which more readily allowed me to think through questions about how affect and emotion—my own and that of my ancestors—were the heart of my story. Memoirs by Natasha Trethewey and Kiese Laymon, poetry from DaMaris Hill and Airea Matthews, and novels by Mat Johnson and Danzy Senna began to take up most of the space on my bedstand. My bibliography grew and I felt encouraged to write in ways that invited readers to feel as well as think.
Even the most bare-bones bureaucratic record was another form of storytelling. I was learning how officials thought about my family, a contrast with how many of my ancestors saw themselves.
I started The Trouble of Color by poring through things I’d been collecting my entire life. I’ve long been a pack rat, which means that I’ve saved letters and diaries, oral histories and newspaper clippings, 19th century China and small gold trinkets. (Only when I finished this book did my husband concede that lugging my family history boxes from place to place over nearly 20 years had been worth it!) I’ll never forget the first time I held in my hand a letter written by my great-grandmother Jenny in her uneven script or the letters my father, at age 11, wrote home while he was away at school. These materials were my starting place and remained my guide.
As I bumped up against the inevitable dead ends and gaps in the story, I turned to more traditional or conventional sources, artifacts well known to social historians: birth and death certificates, wills, census returns, marriage licenses, and more. Worlds from the past began to come into view and still there was too little that was personal or spoke to how people felt on those pages. My insights grew only when I shifted my point of view. Even the most bare-bones bureaucratic record was another form of storytelling. I was learning how officials thought about my family, a contrast with how many of my ancestors saw themselves.
I had to contend with the inevitable contradictions. How, for example, should I think about my great-great-great-grandmother Nancy’s children? The official records showed that she had four daughters, but I’d inherited family stories that numbered Nancy’s girls at seven. How would I tell the story of my great-great-grandmother Isabella when her grandson said she had never been enslaved but the official reports said she’d been owned by an eastern North Carolina slaveholder until the end of the Civil War? Over time, my goals changed. I would not resolve all the conflicting evidence. Instead, that was part of the story: the varying tales that families tell and that others tell about them.
Memoir gave me room to express my imagination on the page, and I also took a few leaps of faith. My great-grandmother Jenny was known to say that she was the grandchild of a New York robber baron. Her story sounded far-fetched but I wondered what might happen if I took it seriously. Could I connect the dots of her life and those of her mother well enough to convince readers that what sounded like Jenny’s tall tale likely reflected a truth about her family history? You’ll have to read the book to see how I did, but my point here is that in a family memoir, Jenny’s recollections mattered as much as the records of that robber baron, which never mentioned her.
I had a story to tell that could only be conveyed by going beyond the historical record to reveal, for example, my own role in the story. I was, I discovered, more than a dutiful chronicler or faithful historian. This became evident as I encountered clerks, librarians, archivists, and genealogists who drew me into what I’d thought was a story about the past. My presence—in reading rooms and at historical sites—shattered any sense I’d had that I was writing about what had come before me. My questions, my searches, and on some days my very body changed the narrative, so much so that I no longer aimed to distinguish past from present or even future.
My presence—in reading rooms and at historical sites—shattered any sense I’d had that I was writing about what had come before me. My questions, my searches, and on some days my very body changed the narrative, so much so that I no longer aimed to distinguish past from present or even future.
Yes. First, take your time. Researching family history, we are very likely to encounter things we did not know, stories that upset what we thought we knew and that cause us to rethink ourselves and the people we love. I sat with some key documents for many years before I was ready to take them in and put them on the page. As important, know who your confidante will be as you work through the materials and your feelings about them. For me, that was a trusted editor who read my words with tenderness and with the admonition that I must keep going.
Revise, revise, and revise again. Writing was the way I worked through feelings of hurt, confusion, and especially shame. My early drafts were rough and raw, and I’m glad to have taken the time to get everything on the page. Only as I rewrote those draft chapters did I begin to see through my own feelings to the story I was aiming to tell. I kept writing until I discovered compassion and ultimately love for nearly everyone in The Trouble of Color. I never aimed for revenge and retribution, but I did work hard until I discovered understanding for the choices people made.
There were characters in this book who frightened me, like my great-grandmother Fannie who was light enough to pass for white, and did. I avoided her until I could not. The chapter had to be written and I dove into the deep end. The result was, for me, not only insight into Fannie and what made her tick. I grew to admire her as a brilliant trickster figure. I’d avoided writing about her, fearing that I was too much like her. Today I admit I may be, but that thought no longer scares me. It tickles me instead.
The best advice I got was to never forget my intended audience. There is enough of me in The Trouble of Color that I sometimes worried that the book was one long clapback directed at anyone who’d ever bruised me when it came to color. But I knew that wasn’t what I had hoped for at all. Instead, I was writing for those people who, when I shared what I was writing about, came to me with searching and sometimes tear-filled eyes. I’ve written a book that is about seeing my family and myself. I also aspired to acknowledge any and all of us who have been wounded in their encounters with the jagged color line.
This book is about the trouble of color. It is also about hope and opens with the spiritual “Wade in the Water”: “Wade in the water, Wade in the water, children, God’s gonna trouble the water.” These words were taught to me by my grandmother Musie. “To trouble,” a complex idea, comes to us from the Book of John: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water. Whosoever then, first after the troubling of the water, stepped in, was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” “To trouble” here is to heal. It is to be made well. The lesson, I think, is that to be “whole” we must also “wade in.” We must risk the currents, the tides, the waves. Perhaps we are not even certain to be strong enough swimmers. Still, we wade—toes, then feet, knees before thighs. Some days we dive right in. We may fear trouble—the trouble that color can invite into our lives. But what awaits us is “the” trouble, the trouble that heals us, the trouble that gives us hope.
I am a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work is devoted to understanding the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. You can find me at work in seminar rooms, at podiums, in front of microphones, and on the pages of books, newspapers, Substack, and social media. My happy place is the archives where I never tire of the adventure of discovery. When I’m looking for sustenance, you can find me in museum galleries where artists, by way of beauty and provocation, challenge my ideas and nourish my spirit.
My creative practice is rooted in the personal essay. My latest book – The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (2025) – recounts my personal journey with race and color through the story of my ancestors’ generations. You’ll recognize signs of my historian’s research skills, but you will also discover how I have felt about inheriting the troubles of the jagged color line – from slavery and sexual violence through passing and colorism. I am grateful to venues from CNN to the Michigan Quarterly Review and Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute for nurturing the stories that have taken full form in The Trouble of Color.
I am the author of prize-winning histories that survey the vast American past, from slavery and the founding, Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s suffrage and Jim Crow, on through modern Civil Rights and present-day race and identity. My 2020 book, Vanguard, chronicled a long struggle for the ballot from the first Black women preachers on through the candidacy of Kamala Harris. Birthright Citizens (2018) told a new history of citizenship in the U.S. as the product of Black American activism and persistence. My work is grounded by women’s history, and Black feminist theory and my first two books – the edited Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015) and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture: 1830 to 1900 (2007) – are that foundation.
My work has received far-ranging support and recognition including book prizes from the Los Angeles Times, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Society for Legal History. ASLH in fall 2024 named me an honorary fellow, the highest honor that the society bestows. Deeply meaningful are the distinctions extended to me by my alma maters. In 2019, the CUNY School of Law awarded me an honorary doctor of laws degree; in 2021 Columbia University granted me the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement, and in 2024 Hunter College inducted me into the school’s hall of fame. I’ve received fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center. I am an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of American Historians, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 2023, President Joe Biden appointed me a member of the Permanent Committee on the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise.
Expect to encounter my by-line from time to time. For the New York Times I have written on culture and travel, including the widely read “Enslaved to A Founding Father, She Sought Freedom in France” about Abigail, an enslaved woman held by the family of John Jay. My opinion columns have appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, Talking Points Memo, and USA Today. You can also hear or see me via outlets such as NPR’s Here & Now and 1A, CNN’s Amanpour, and MSNBC’s the Rachel Maddow Show. Podcasts such as the Ezra Klein Show and the 19th*’s Amendment have given me opportunities for long-form conversation.
Behind the scenes, my expertise supports media productions and cultural institutions. Check the fine print and you’ll see that I’ve been an advisor and consultant to the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Obama Foundation, the National Women’s History Museum, and the U.S. Capital Historical Society. I have joined television and film productions, in front of and behind the camera for Netflix, Arte (France), and PBS American Experience.
At Johns Hopkins University, I teach for the department of history and the SNF Agora Institute. I also direct the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project where my lab investigates the history of slavery and racism connected with Johns Hopkins University and Medicine. Teaching takes me farther afield, reaching learners of many ages and stations thanks to organizations such as the National Constitution Center, the Pulitzer Center, the Zinn Education Project, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and the Institute for Constitutional History at New York Historical. I am indebted to my own teachers. At the CUNY School of Law, I was trained by mentors like Patricia Williams and Victor Goode, and at Columbia University I studied with Eric Foner, Manning Marable, and Alice Kessler-Harris.
My parents, a full decade before Loving v. Virginia, married despite the persistence of the color line. I was baptized in upper Manhattan’s Ascension Roman Catholic Church, took my first steps on the sidewalks of Harlem’s Riverton, and started school in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington. I eventually returned to New York City, a student at Hunter College and after law school as a store-front poverty lawyer battling for people facing homelessness, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS. A year as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York let me see how I might mix social justice and academic research.
I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and Greenport, New York, with my husband, historian Jean Hébrard.
This interview was conducted by Sabrina Cofer. She is the digital media producer at Choice.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.
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